Thursday, May 08, 2008

Good grief - I' ve just realised it's V-E Day! Or it was in 1945 (and it was hot and sunny in London on that day too). This seems now to be a virtually forgotten date - how extraordinary. Some very evocative pictures here. I particularly like the heavily laden lorry carrying Toby ales and stouts, and sundry revellers. A different world...

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Am just reading - commemoratively! - Escape and Liberation 1940-1945, by A.J. Evans. Published in December 1945 (!!), it is an excellent on the spot account of this RAF officer in Germany at the time of the unconditional surrender (in Luneburg).

Some real gems. To wit: "German soldiers who are not under the orders of someone are always rather pitiful objects. They are like lost souls, earnestly desiring someone to take charge of them - the devil being better than no one."

Poor things indeed. There's a bit in Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel where he says that in Germany (before either war) if you put up a sign on a bridge saying Bridge Closed, the locals would all walk straight into the river without a second thought.

In the English park in Wiesbaden they have all of the trees numbered, also the squirrel boxes, we reckoned that they lined them up for roll call every morning.Next to Koln's Dom there is a large plaza, in the busiest part of town, underneath is the rehearsal and recording auditorium for the WDR Koln symphony orchestra, they use it a lot, every time at least 10 security guards are posted around the perimeter of the plaza to shoo pedestrians away, this they obediently do without complaint.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.